A Stray Record of Stalinist Horrors Finds Its Way Home

By CELESTINE BOHLEN

Published: December 14, 2002

Correction Appended

A small piece of history, which for decades served as a crucial source for scholars of the Soviet Union, was returned yesterday when 541 records taken from Communist Party archives by the Nazis in 1941 were handed over to the Russian government by the American Ambassador, Alexander Vershbow.

The story of how the records from the western Russian city of Smolensk traveled from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany, then to the National Archives in Washington, and now back to Russia encapsulates the perplexing and often secretive fate of historical documents during and after World War II.

''The Smolensk archives had become a symbol of the problem of displaced archives and the restitution problems that arose after World War II,'' said Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, a leading expert on Soviet archives and an associate at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. ''Their odysessy is like a microcosm of all the cases.''

The Smolensk files, seized by the United States Army in Bavaria in 1945, were actually only a small portion of the voluminous Communist Party archives that had been removed by the invading Nazis in 1941. The rest were taken back to the Soviet Union after they were recaptured by the Red Army at the end of the war.

While not complete, the Smolensk archives in Washington were revealing enough to become the cornerstone of research into the inner workings of the Communist Party during the famine and the political purges of the 1930's. The eminent Sovietologist Merle Fainson used them for his landmark book, ''Smolensk Under Soviet Rule,'' published in 1958.

''They were probably the only original documentation we have about the horrors of collectivization,'' Ms. Grimsted said, referring to the brutal agricultural policy of Joseph Stalin, which cost millions of lives.

The United States proposed returning the archives to the Soviet Union in the 1960's, but the offer was then refused, apparently because Soviet leaders at the time wanted to distance themselves from the Stalinist policies. Later, in the mid-90's, the return of the files was linked to demands for the return by the Russians of books claimed by the Lubavitchers, a community of Orthodox Jews in New York City. Those books are still in Moscow.

In the years after the collapse of Communism in 1991, Ms. Grimsted said, the Russians would point to the Smolensk files as a reason for their refusal to return those from other countries -- in particular, the vast collection of documents, said to measure four miles in shelf space, that had been taken by the Nazis from Paris and were later captured by the Red Army.

Most of those files, which included military documents as well as archives from France's Jewish community, have since been returned to France, Ms. Grimsted said.

The return of the Smolensk archives, which took place yesterday at the Russian Ministry of Culture in Moscow, is seen by Ms. Grimsted and other experts as one in a series of breakthroughs in the effort to restore World War II-era property, following up on international agreements reached in 1998 at the Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets.

Correction: December 16, 2002, Monday An article in Arts & Ideas on Saturday about the return of Communist Party archives taken by the Nazis in 1941 from Smolensk, Russia, misspelled the surname of a Sovietologist who has used the documents. He is Merle Fainsod, not Fainson.